Cecile Girard

Cécile Girard is a French artist, born in Paris.In 2009, she decided to go and live in China and get back to the sources of her inspiration, traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting. She deepened her knowledge and technique with ink, learning from contemporary and traditional Chinese painters and this helped to develop her painting. She has been resident in Shanghai since July, 2009. She set up a Fine Arts course workshop there, intended for Chinese and foreign students of all ages. At the same time, she taught in a Chinese private school (SUIS, Shanghai United International School); in 2009, she createdand ran the department of western art in its local and international section. From 2013, she started running the Art Department in the US High School section.Since 2012, Cécile has worked together with the Pavillon de l’Exposition Universelle organised in Shanghai (experimental "open class", exhibitions) and also with the University of Shanghai (Shanghai Normal University, conferences, publications).Cécile Girard started her painting and history of art studies in Paris at the Martenot School of Art, the Ecole du Louvre and the Sorbonne.In the mid-90’s, Cécile went to China where she studied calligraphy at the School of Fine Arts in Beijing. She subscribed at the same time to the artistic movement of the Naxi painters from Yunnan in Beijing and worked together with the Naxi painter Zhang Chun He. In the same era Cécile created the art department at the BISS (Beijing International School of Singapore) where she was director for four years.

After Beijing, Cécile went to live and travel in Italy for two years where she studied stained glass art.Returning to France, she was director of the art department at the IDSP (German international school of Paris) where she taught until the summer of 2009. Careful to maintain a link with China, she perfected her mastery of traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy with the painter Deanna Gao.Cécile regularly exhibits her art which is on show in galleries in both France and China. In 2005, she was selected for the 2003-2005 France-China Exchange Years. In 2014, she took part in a group exhibition in China and in France as part of the celebrations to mark fifty years of Sino-French relations.Her style, given a particular effect by the special treatment of the material (various Chinese papers) together with a technique of crumpling the paper, creates new textures combining Chinese ink, acrylic and oil. The way the space is divided up is inspired by the principle used in open screens, principles converging with those of the treatment of light in stained glass art, which she discovered in Italy. The use of pictograms from the Naxi people's Dongba culture and the choice of tones harmonise with the blue- greens and orange-reds symbolic of the province of Yunnan.Cécile Girard thus creates an original pictorial vocabulary which brings together the most ancient of Chinese and western symbols.